To Be Wild
by scribblemyname
Summary: What are sisters for?
1. give me an inch

**Title: **To Be Wild  
><strong>Summary: <strong>What are sisters for? Raven  
><strong>Prompt: <strong>LJ **starsparkle333 **| _Give me an inch / I promise I'll take a mile / Danger is beauty / I'll face it with a smile / / I'm on a mission / With no restrictions / Don't second guess myself / I'm born to be wild_  
><strong>AN:** Yes, I have other stories I owe you all. I'm even working on them. I promise. And I'll get them posted soon.

* * *

><p>give me an inch<p>

He always kept the welcome mat out for her, when she showed up, small blue elf in tow and asked for him to be placed in a good home anywhere that neither of their ideologies reigned; when she showed up, battered and bruised from one too many raids on one too many top-secret, mutant-experimenting facilities, not a word across her lips how many people she had killed (he found that out later from Havok's clean-up mission to discover the place had been blown to smithereens, workers still inside), and when she showed up, angry and hurt because Erik had bandaged all the hurt places Azazel had left behind, then turned around and fathered twins on Magda and proclaimed her the love of his life.

Charles never could turn anyone away.

Alex backed away wary. She let him, until the night she found him rocking a tiny, blue-tailed baby in his arms. She looked at him and smiled. Alex did not trust the smile.

Sean ignored her when he could, but he found it tough to ignore her those three weeks she spent recovering with them before Alex learned the truth. Raven had always liked his favorite ice cream; they used to bond over rocky road. One night, one kitchen. He gave an inch.

Hank would sometimes reach out tentatively, to be greeted in return with white smiles in her blue skin and reassured, once more, she found him more attractive for all that made him mutant than for all that had once let him hide.

Just one inch.

Azazel's baby. The death of one hundred and forty-two humans she clearly cared nothing about (raised eyebrows, infinitesimal shrug). One more rebound from one more rejection from one more man that had promised her the world. Betrayal after betrayal, but Charles never _could_ turn anyone away.


	2. I promise I'll take a mile

**Title: **To Be Wild  
><strong>Summary: <strong>What are sisters for? Raven  
><strong>Prompt: <strong>LJ **starsparkle333 **| _Give me an inch / I promise I'll take a mile / Danger is beauty / I'll face it with a smile / / I'm on a mission / With no restrictions / Don't second guess myself / I'm born to be wild_  
><strong>AN:** Yes, I have other stories I owe you all. I'm even working on them. I promise. And I'll get them posted soon.

* * *

><p>I promise I'll take a mile<p>

Forgetting wasn't a luxury any of them indulged in. Not Erik—those years hunting his personal nightmares down until every last one of them was dead were not some deviation from his character. Not Charles—he couldn't hold to hope if he didn't hold to the memories that made it possible, the times spent laughing in the sun with a little blue girl who made him feel one day, no mutant child would ever have to be alone. Not Raven—memory was the key to illusion, and illusion was her one tool, her one gift, her one form of controlling a world that had always caged her in.

Raven Darkholme-Xavier could wrap herself in any shade or facet of her former self, shroud her heart beneath mystique, then build a new person out of the fierceness under her skin just screaming to be let out. She studied every nuance in the people around her, always had, quantified them, learned to think as if she lived beneath their skin, learned the way they moved and responded, spoke and listened. Now these memories were a calculation to grant her the things she needed.

Alex was the hardest to crack.

Charles' distance was grudging and uncertain. Anything could melt it away, but she let it grow a little more between them. No need to rekindle her own desire to stay inside his pretty castles in the air. Sean didn't know how to handle her. She handled _him_with kit gloves and gave him neither reason to draw near (unless, of course, he was drawn to babies, but as most teenage boys, he wasn't) nor to walk away. Hank—

Nothing to say there. When she first returned, with a child no less, the hurt in his eyes ensured he kept his distance during her stay.

But Alex was the orphan. He'd been burned and he'd been hardened and still chose to walk with the angels of light (she didn't argue with their viewpoints on her brother; Charles' heart was good if nothing else). He'd lost his brother, lost his parents. It took so little to see his eyes stray to the baby blue boy in her arms. It took so much to find a way to get the inch she needed.

But she got it.

One night, she found him rocking Kurt back to sleep from a fitful dream. She smiled and watched Alex's eyes grow weary.

"I'm not going to help you," he said suddenly, warily. "I don't know what you're up to, but count me out."

She shifted then, took on the innocent almost-schoolgirl she most certainly wasn't, but that he remembered, and spoke honestly—even if she left all the important parts out.

"I don't want Charles to raise him," she said softly. "He won't help me find a family for Kurt, a _real_family, that isn't fighting a war."

Alex's mouth opened, then shut. He held the child in his arms a little tighter. Children fighting in a war—yes, she knew her brother well. Azazel was no better. Alex could understand this need of hers, identify with it, even if he hated her now, did not trust her (and really, he shouldn't), even if he didn't know her other plans for the distant future when she needed her son raised any way but the way that Charles would give him.

"What do you want me to do?"

* * *

><p>Alex was the first one she betrayed.<p>

She didn't answer when he opened the door and she stumbled in, battered and bleeding, darkly bitter for being abandoned by her own teammate and the father of her child. Alex asked her what happened, and all she would say was she needed help. They had left her behind.

(She didn't say, I killed them all. I destroyed the facility that might have information on where your brother is. I saved the children and delivered them to Erik to make them warriors like you thought I'd never do.)

Charles could not possibly turn her away, hurt and in need, the childhood friend and sister of his youth. (Their laughter still echoes in the mansion hallways, but it's fading and both of them know one day it will all be gone.)

Hank could only bandage her awkwardly and keep his face turned away. She did not really need him yet. He could hardly trust her, not tending the marks of Azazel's tail, not knowing that if one team member could betray another, then surely Raven could do the same.

She needed their trust—and time, to heal. She found it in a late night, slipping into the mansion kitchen and rummaging in the refrigerator for the quart of rocky road she knew Sean would still have stashed. She wore clothes and bandages, compromises to seem less dangerous, more like the girl he remembered and laughed with a couple years before. (She did not like to think that trust would never work with any of them after the X-Men joined the war.)

Sean came down, uncertain at this intruder into his nighttime space, but she sat innocently, feet curled up beneath her, shoving a bowl across the counter and a spoon.

"I miss this sometimes," she said. (When had she gotten so cold? Who was she kidding? Even at ten, she was an actress in order to survive.)

"Miss what?" he asked, cautiously, glancing about as if wishing he could still ignore her.

She grinned at him. "Everything."

A few more minutes. A bit of rocky road. He relaxed.

Sean's defense of her presence carried her through the worst of the healing, two weeks before Alex came home as Havok and told Charles just what she had done.

"Raven,"—anguished pleas from a brother who had set her feet so carefully on this path himself—"please tell me you didn't do this."

Raised eyebrows, an infinitesimal shrug. "They were killing us." Kill or be killed. Law of the jungle.

Alex's jaw tightened. He should never have trusted her smile.

* * *

><p>She took a mile out of Hank the next time she landed on their doorstep, this time seething and furious with a man who had been her lover. Erik—<em>we already are the better men<em> Erik—had cheated on her with his baseline human lover, claimed his twin children for the cause, and declared Magda his one and only.

For Hank, she played no games. She wore her blue skin and red hair and would not cry and waited for him to reach out for her, so obviously hurting from being betrayed by every man she had ever given her heart to (including him; Alex should have told him not to trust her).

She waited until he reached to fill those empty places—_and he'd said she wasn't beautiful_—_then_ she claimed him for her own.

In his bed or her bed, against the bathroom door, one time, hard and rough in front of the fireplace where he'd broken her heart. She needed to feel, to wreak her heart's vengeance on somebody, anybody, that deserved it and not deal with the consequences later. (The X-Men would fight them one day, so she had no reason to retain his trust.)

She loved him; she left him. She fought him; she hated him.

"You could have come with me," she whispered on their last night (though he did not know it yet). "I _wanted_ you to."

And he thought of it, caught his breath with it. She watched the wonderment go through Hank's eyes, fleeting flashes, would Kurt have been _theirs?_

"Raven," he whispered back.

And that's when she went cold, pushed off of him. He never could accept that she was what she was, and the tiger sleeping within her when he'd known her was now awake.

"Mystique."


	3. danger is beauty

**Title: **To Be Wild  
><strong>Summary: <strong>What are sisters for? Raven  
><strong>Prompt: <strong>LJ **starsparkle333 **| _Give me an inch / I promise I'll take a mile / Danger is beauty / I'll face it with a smile / / I'm on a mission / With no restrictions / Don't second guess myself / I'm born to be wild_  
><strong>AN:** Yes, I have other stories I owe you all. I'm even working on them. I promise. And I'll get them posted soon.

* * *

><p>danger is beauty<p>

Mystique learned early on that safety was plush fair skin and fair hair—_never mind her own was black_. Safety was pretty; safety was cute; safety was meeting the expectations in the mind of the other person.

And never mind glossing over the details you don't know—_she'd get better with that in time, too_—because they would _try_ so hard to make sense of the world and write off the little things she got wrong. Even an occasional golden glint to her eye.

She used to glance in mirrors or puddles as a little girl and turn her face to blue in the glassy surface, let the scales surface in whorls, stare wonderingly and longingly at the other side.

Mystique learned early on that danger was blue skin with red hair and golden eyes. Danger was beauty; danger was wild; danger was playing cat and mouse with the expectations in the mind of the other person.

She took Erik's hand, walked away, and promised Charles in thoughts flung at his injured mind, _I have loved you, but you know this won't be half-hearted._

A sad mental smile, familiar in its taste. _Yes, Raven. I know._


End file.
